The trouble is, ““The Peacemaker’’ thinks it has a mind. (As proof of its seriousness, it dispenses with a star romance.) It’s the first studio movie to touch upon the war in Bosnia, but it does this so meretriciously that you wish it had stuck to fantasy. Most egregious is its piano-playing Serb villain, to whom the movie attempts to give tragic depths by showing us his daughter’s death by snipers. (In Sarajevo, it wasn’t Serbs who were killed by sniper fire.) Nothing about this man–his motives, his odd politics–makes any sense. Leder tries to bring a sense of grief to a body-count-happy genre, but you can’t have it both ways. Every time Kidman and Clooney take a break from their movie-star bantering to mourn a death, it rings hollow. You don’t cast Nicole Kidman as a nuclear scientist and then expect the audience to furrow its brow over world events. Where’s mindlessness when we really need it?
